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    Paul McCartney Talks About His Beatles Photos Coming to the Brooklyn Museum

    Sixty years after the Beatles appeared live on “Ed Sullivan,” McCartney reflects on his photos capturing those halcyon days. The Brooklyn Museum will exhibit them, and some will be for sale later.They are now a collector’s trove — Paul McCartney’s own photos, shot 60 years ago, when the Beatles took Europe and America by storm: images of screaming fans (one carrying a live monkey); a girl in a yellow bikini; airport workers playing air guitar, and unguarded moments grabbed from trains, planes and automobiles.McCartney, now 81, doesn’t like to sit still and reminisce about the past, so he chatted while driving home from his recording studio in Sussex, England. ‘‘My American friends call these small, one-way lanes ‘gun barrels,’ ’’ he said, warning his interviewer that at any moment the signal might die (it did). In the end, it took two days to complete a coherent conversation about the breakthrough period when the Beatles went viral, captured in the traveling exhibition ‘‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-1964: Eyes of the Storm,’’ which features 250 of his shots. Currently it’s at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., and comes to the Brooklyn Museum May 3-August 18. (Don’t be surprised if the artist shows up for the opening.)It was McCartney’s archivist, Sarah Brown, who found 1,000 photographs the musician had taken over 12 weeks — from Dec. 7, 1963, to Feb. 21, 1964, — in the artist’s library.“I thought the photos were lost,’’ he said. ‘‘In the ’60s it was pretty easy. Often doors were left open. We’d invite fans in.” Even the recording studio wasn’t a safe space. “I was taking my daughter Mary to the British Library to show her where to research for her exams, and in one display case I saw the lyric sheet for ‘Yesterday,’” he said. A sticky fingered biographer had swiped the original from their studio.Rosie Broadley, a senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where the show was inaugurated, said, “His photographs show us what it was like to look through his eyes while the Beatles conquered the world.’’McCartney won an art prize at school and practiced photography with his brother, Mike (who later became a professional photographer). He graduated to a 35 mm SLR Pentax camera when the Beatles hit it big.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Dick Waterman, Promoter and Photographer of the Blues, Dies at 88

    A “crackpot eccentric Yankee” from Massachusetts, he revived the careers of long-forgotten Southern artists during the blues boom of the 1960s.Dick Waterman, a beacon in the world of blues who as a promoter, talent manager and photographer helped revive the careers of a generation of storied purveyors of that bedrock American art form while lyrically documenting their journeys with his camera, died on Jan. 26 in Oxford, Miss. He was 88.His niece Theodora Saal said the cause was heart failure. A native of Massachusetts, he had lived in Oxford for nearly four decades.Through his company, Avalon Productions, which was considered the first management and booking agency devoted primarily to Black blues artists, Mr. Waterman provided overdue exposure — and income — to early blues luminaries like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Skip James.He also shepherded the careers of a younger blues cohort, including Buddy Guy and Otis Rush, as well as one young white artist, the singer-songwriter and future Grammy Award winner Bonnie Raitt.Mr. Waterman in 2003 in Oxford, Miss. A native of Massachusetts, he lived in Oxford for nearly four decades.Bruce Newman“Dick Waterman just may be the most knowledgeable man on the history of blues,” the music writer Don Wilcock wrote in 2019 on the website American Blues Scene. Mr. Waterman, he added, “sought out the originators of the genre, pulled them out of ‘retirement’ and presented them to a folk audience that to that point considered blues to be a footnote in the American musical history.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys Show ‘Giants’ in Brooklyn

    Right in the middle of the exhibition “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,” which opens Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, is Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long 2008 painting “Femme Piquée par un Serpent.” Showing a Black man in snappy but casual dress reclined in a distinctively twisted position, with a background of Wiley’s signature flowers, it borrows both title and pose from an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger. What you think of it really depends on what you’re asking for.If you view the painting as a Venti-size iteration of Wiley’s ongoing project, his decades-long attack on the paucity of Black faces in Western museums and art history, it’s one-note but hard to argue with. Brightly colored and thoughtfully composed, it’s visually appealing, and even today, when it’s no longer so uncommon to see Black figures on museum walls, catching sight of one this big still elicits a thrill.On the other hand, considered strictly as a painting, “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” (“Woman Bitten by a Serpent”) doesn’t offer that much. There are no details that you’d miss in a jpeg reproduction, no visible evidence of human hands at play, no sensual pleasure to be found in the surface, nothing surprising, mysterious or engrossing. It’s simply the adept illustration of an idea.Of course, you could also ask for both — for a clear conceptual work about painting (and the historical exclusion of Black subjects and artists) that is also a good painting. If you do, you’re likely to respond to “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” with ambivalence and frustration.Swizz Beatz, in turquoise at left, and Alicia Keys, at right, greet guests at the opening of “Giants,” in front of Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long “Femme Piquée par un Serpent,” from 2008.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesI was thinking about this — about artistic endeavors that succeed and fail at the same time — as I walked through “Giants,” the latest celebrity tie-in exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. (“Spike Lee: Creative Sources” closes on Sunday; a show of photographs by Paul McCartney opens in May.) “Giants” draws on the extensive art collection of the married musical superstars Keys and Beatz (Kasseem Dean), bringing together 98 works — many oversized and of recent vintage — by 37 artists. Most of them are American, but they also come from several countries in Europe and half a dozen in Africa, and they range in generation from Ernie Barnes, who died at 70 in 2009, to Qualeasha Wood, born in 1996.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Exclusive: Elton John’s Auction Has It All: Boots to Banksy

    Elton John is downsizing — and the superstar’s former penthouse residence in Atlanta has been emptied for a series of auctions at Christie’s starting on Feb. 21. The items are expected to bring in an estimated $10 million.Want the Yamaha conservatory grand piano where the Rocketman plunked the keys of his Broadway shows “Billy Elliot” and “Aida?” It will cost roughly triple what similar models sell for online, with a high estimate of $50,000.How about Julian Schnabel’s portrait of the superstar dressed in a gown and ruffled collar? The auction house is seeking $300,000.And the most expensive object, a 2017 Banksy painting of a masked man hurling a bouquet of flowers, secured directly from the anonymous artist, is expected to sell for nearly $1.5 million.Included in the auction: prescription sunglasses by Sir Winston Eyeware that Elton John owned; a diamond pendant necklace set with round diamond letters spelling “The Bitch Is Back,” estimated at $20,000-$40,000; a Cartier sapphire ring, 18k yellow gold, $50,000-$80,000.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesJohn declined to comment on the auction. (Agostino Guerra, a Christie’s spokesman, cited “long-planned scheduling conflicts.”) However, the singer’s husband and manager, David Furnish, discussed the sale in a recent interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Tales of the Black Underworld Fuel Rap. ValTown Recounts Them.

    ValTown, an account on X and other social media platforms, spotlights gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and 1990s — and how crime and celebrity often intersect.Beginning in the late 2010s, Brian Valmond started shining a light on stories that are often shaded by secrecy, exaggeration, self-protection and self-aggrandizing.His subject matter is, by and large, the world of Black gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and ’90s — topics that have also long driven the aesthetics and narratives of hip-hop. Since 2017, Valmond, 25, has been using his @_ValTown_ account on Twitter, now known as X, to unravel these tales bit by bit in threads that become mini events. His stories are tantalizing and sometimes surprising, especially when he highlights the links between the criminal underworld and the realm of celebrity, underscoring the blurred lines between those two milieus.“The Italian Mafia, they’re all in the media, they’re glamorized and they have their underworld legends, whereas the Black underworld is very villainized as predators,” Valmond said in an October interview at a Brooklyn park. “So, I wanted to show, not to glorify it, but say, we have our underworld legends as well.”On his accounts — he’s accumulated more than 180,000 followers on X, and over 100,000 on Instagram — Valmond has examined drug lords and gangsters from all over the country: well-known figures like Harlem’s Rich Porter and Azie Faison (whose stories shaped the film “Paid in Full,” starring Cam’ron); or Atlanta’s Black Mafia Family, crucial in the early career of Jeezy; or the original 50 Cent, from whom the rapper got his name. After he wrote about Freeway Rick Ross, the Los Angeles cocaine kingpin, Ross invited Valmond to spend time with him in California.Valmond also probes the places where crime and music have collided, detailing the sometimes unsavory pasts of well-known hip-hop executives like Suge Knight and Big U, or the story of Peter Shue, the club promoter, drug dealer and reported paramour of Madonna. He’s posted a detailed history of Sean Combs’s father, Melvin Combs, a purported associate of the 1970s Harlem crime boss Nicky Barnes. And sometimes, he simply unearths unexpected behind-the-scenes factoids, like a recent thread about the tough-guy exploits of the pioneering pop rapper MC Hammer.“The Italian Mafia, they’re all in the media, they’re glamorized and they have their underworld legends, whereas the Black underworld is very villainized as predators,” Valmond said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSome of Valmond’s work, particularly about the intersection of hip-hop stars and street life, involves “the kind of things people talked about in hushed tones but never made it into print journalism, because they weren’t stories that could be sourced in a credible way, but they were common knowledge to people in the scene,” said the journalist Noah Callahan-Bever. Valmond’s threads, he said, “gave these stories the folklore, the grandeur they deserved.”Crucial to Valmond’s approach are old photographs, which he tracks down from various online sources, and sometimes from family members or associates of the figures he’s spotlighting. The photos are not simply nostalgia — they are also historical references of style and attitude presentations that have trickled out into the mainstream via hip-hop, which took those street reference points and made them into culture. The photos, which capture fleeting poses of chest-puffing celebration (think fresh-off-the-lot sports cars, ostentatiously large gold chains, ritzy nightclubs, spotless designer clothes) are often the most solid documentation of a moment that only tenuously documented itself.“That era is almost extinct, right?” said Shawn Hartwell, who served two decades on racketeering charges for crimes committed when he was a teenager. “And he’s keeping it alive so people could say, Yo, remember one time it was like this? Other than that, you gonna wipe a whole culture or a generation away.”But the excess on display, those photos reflect a complex and tragic reality. “When you see them old pictures, you barely see life. You see survival mode,” Hartwell said. “That’s survival, that’s not glamour. And some people don’t know that because they not in that mode.“Most of the people in those pictures have life sentences,” he added, “or died.”For Valmond, there’s a fine line between glamorization of street life and reality check. “Somebody might watch a show like ‘Snowfall’ and be like, Oh wow, I want to be a drug dealer,” he said. “But it’s like, that’s not the story. Yeah, it might be glorious now, but it’s going to end up pretty bad.”Valmond is a humble and unassuming chronicler of a deeply chaotic time. Dressed quietly, in a black tracksuit, he asked as many questions as he answered, his demeanor bookish and focused.He was raised by strict Caribbean parents — his mother is from Haiti and his father is from Dominica — and spent his early years in Far Rockaway, Queens, then moved with his family to Delaware, where he still resides. He returned to New York during summers, and stayed close with friends who were being drawn into street life.At the suggestion of a high school English teacher, Valmond began to explore writing screenplays, but also took notice of the stories unfolding right before him.“In my neighborhood growing up, if you weren’t playing basketball or if you weren’t like a artsy type of kid, you sold drugs,” he said.For Valmond, there’s a fine line between glamorization of street life and reality check. Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesIn 2017, he spent a fruitless summer in between his first two years of college calling Hollywood studio phone numbers he found online to pitch a script, to no avail.“I tried to put it in this fictional world, but then those things started to actually happen in my real life,” he explained. “Like, my friends started to die, my friends started to go to jail and things started to get very real around the time that I started writing. So I was like, maybe it’s a bigger purpose. Maybe let me start telling the stories of people that actually been through this in real life.”Later that year, he saw a Twitter thread that spoke to him, and decided to make his own. Before long, he was posting prolifically.“I was going to school,” he recalled, “but I wasn’t going to class. I was checking into the library and I would stay there all day researching, getting pictures, putting threads together.”His first two threads tackled the Queens drug kingpin Lorenzo (Fat Cat) Nichols and the Los Angeles gangster Freeway Rick Ross. He soon posted about Robert Sandifer, who was murdered at 11 years old by members of his own gang, a gruesome and vivid crime that led to a Time magazine cover story in 1994.There are some precedents for Valmond’s coverage. In the 2000s, street magazines like F.E.D.S. and Don Diva emerged to document underworld figures, sometimes in their own words. Some YouTube channels trade in old street-life war stories. And in earlier phases of the internet, message boards and blogs touched on these subjects as well.Though Valmond begins with news reports and other published information, some facts are impossible to independently verify. Memories can be hazy, and reputations are sometimes built on bluster. His threads can sometimes land closer to apocrypha than unassailable truth. (There are a handful of other Twitter and Instagram accounts that stake out similar content, but Valmond’s have been the most in-depth and consistent.)The internet is both infinite and shortsighted — stories can be forever archived, and also forever forgotten. Many of these tales were known in their time, but lost to history. Valmond thrills in resurfacing them, and in the connectivity that social media allows: Not only researching and relaying these stories, but sometimes using them to connect with people involved, and unearthing even more information.Luc (Spoon) Stephen, a film producer and onetime associate of Fat Cat Nichols, took notice of Valmond’s 2017 thread on the drug dealer. Like Valmond, Stephen is from Queens, and of Haitian descent. He admired Valmond’s curiosity and dedication to the truth, and began sharing stories with him and making introductions.“A lot of the younger people don’t listen, but he soaks it up and he has to evaluate from there, he has to check it again,” Stephen said in an interview. “I could take a key and I can turn it in the lock and open the lock and then walk away, but now he has to open the door and explore.”In 2018, when Callahan-Bever was working as the executive vice president of brand strategy and content at Def Jam Records, he hired Valmond as an intern, once he found out how young he was: “I sort of assumed he was an older guy based on the topics and depth of knowledge, but he was still in college.”Valmond said the experience was eye-opening. “That was the first time for me that I’d seen that my skill set could put me in an environment beyond the neighborhood,” he said.Valmond’s ongoing work reflects shifting norms around public discussion of street tales. In recent years, a smattering of films and television programs have tackled these eras, including the documentary series “Hip Hop Uncovered” and “American Gangster,” the film “Paid in Full” and the TV dramas “BMF” and “Power,” both executive produced in part by 50 Cent.Today, many online hip-hop media sites and personalities focus heavily on criminal affiliations of musicians, or those close to them — a near unthinkable turn from a couple of decades ago when criminal records weren’t as available or easily disseminated, and when performers may have woven street tales into their songs but otherwise largely aimed to keep their nonmusical life private. Some outlets are also preoccupied with whether musicians involved in criminal cases cooperated with the authorities, aiming to make distinctions between artists with varying levels of street credibility.To Valmond, those are moot questions: “I post everybody, whether they cooperated, whether they were, quote-unquote, stand-up. That just puts everything on a level playing field. So people know, like, he’s not picking and choosing sides.”In recent months, Valmond has also expanded into longer video content, including “Rich in the Hood,” a podcast interview series and a six-part documentary series on YouTube more extensively covering some of the subjects of Valmond’s threads — “making it cinematic,” Valmond said — and “Blood Currency,” a show on his Patreon that looks at criminal enterprises from around the globe.“I still get pushback from my community where people would be like, ‘You’re glorifying drug dealers.’ Or, ‘How could you post these people that poison the neighborhood?’” Valmond said. “That’s because they’re so used to seeing it glamorized on television and in movies. It’s like, no, I’m not doing that. Just take the time, read it and you’ll see for yourself what it is I’m trying to convey.” More

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    Best Arts Photos of 2023

    Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt More

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    Winona Ryder Fans Celebrate New Photo Book of the ‘Eternal Cool Girl’

    Fans of Winona Ryder lined up outside Dover Street Market in Manhattan on a recent chilly evening to attend a launch party for “Winona,” a book of Polaroids and cellphone shots of the Gen X cultural idol.“She’s so famously private that any peek into her interior life is delicious,” Daniela Tijerina, a writer and editorial assistant for Vanity Fair, said. “I’ve molded so much about my own style after a woman I know so little about, and that makes her as cool as a person can possibly be.”The shots in the book were taken by Robert Rich, who started photographing Ms. Ryder soon after becoming friends with her more than 20 years ago. His images capture her in unguarded moments: eating pizza during a sleepover at his Hell’s Kitchen apartment; and smoking a cigarette in a bathroom, while the model Daria Werbowy quoted lines from “Reality Bites” to her.Robert Rich, whose candid shots fill “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesPortraits of the Gen X star from the book “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Mr. Rich, 57, signed copies of his book, as guests mobbed a merch table selling T-shirts, caps and tote bags, all of which read: “Winona.”“What we love about Winona is that you know nothing about her,” Mr. Rich said. “We love that she’s a mysterious woman. I used to never recognize her when I’d meet her. She’d always be wearing a visor or a pageboy cap. I’d walk through the city with her, and no one even knew who I was with.”He befriended Ms. Ryder when he was a manager of the Marc Jacobs store on Mercer Street in SoHo in 1999. The shop was a hangout for Selma Blair, Sofia Coppola, Parker Posey and Kate Moss, and Mr. Rich often took Polaroids of celebrity clients in his basement office.He got to know Ms. Ryder during fittings at the store and later helped dress her in Marc Jacobs pieces for parties, premieres and magazine photo shoots. After Ms. Ryder’s shoplifting trial in 2002, he became a confidante during a period when she retreated from public view.Joe Jonas, left, looks through “Winona.”Ye Fan for The New York TimesA shot from the new book.Robert RichA year ago, Mr. Rich found himself thinking about all the Polaroids he had amassed in several shoeboxes in his closet, and he texted Ms. Ryder about the idea of collecting them in a book. After she said yes, the London-based book dealer and publisher, Idea, took on the project. Marc Jacobs wrote the foreword.As the party guests sipped champagne and flipped through the book, Mr. Jacobs made an appearance.“She was our young Garbo,” he said. “A Winona sighting was always a big deal back then. She came to one of my shows at the time, and I still remember she was a little like a deer in the headlights. She’s not snobbish. She’s not the red carpet girl. And that has always added to her cachet and cool.”Francesca Sorrenti, who designed and edited the book, reflected on Ms. Ryder’s enduring appeal.“To understand Winona, you have to understand the youth movement of the 1990s,” she said. “There are only a few personalities quite like hers out there at any given time, and in her era, it was Kate Moss and Winona. You’d just see them and you’d want to know, Who is that?”Another of Mr. Rich’s shots from “Winona.”Robert RichAt the party, Marc Jacobs likened Ms. Ryder to the reclusive Greta Garbo.Robert RichMs. Sorrenti said that Ms. Ryder’s shyness added to her mystique.Robert Rich“I’ve hung out with Winona,” Ms. Sorrenti added. “And yes, she’s shy, and that shyness also projected itself into what her fans consider her mystique.”Hanging out by a rack of Comme des Garçons jackets was Inna Blavatnik, a creative director. “I’m of the Generation X era that Winona represented,” she said. “It was all about having a moody cool and not giving a you-know-what, and she became my role model as a teenager.”As the night progressed, the fashion designer Zac Posen and the musician Joe Jonas stopped by — and a question loomed: Would Ms. Ryder show?“I texted her about the party,” Mr. Rich said, “but I haven’t heard anything back yet.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes offered: “I’ve known Winona for a long time, and when you get to know her, she’s extremely present and generous, but she’s also good at disappearing into the ether.” She concluded: “If she were coming, she wouldn’t tell anyone she was.”The filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes said Ms. Ryder was “good at disappearing into the ether.”Robert RichGuests at the “Winona” party.Ye Fan for The New York TimesMs. Ryder ultimately never materialized, but Jayna Maleri, a fashion editorial director, said she preferred it that way. “I almost never want to see Winona Ryder in person,” she said. “Not because I think she’d disappoint me, but because she occupies a place in my brain so rooted in my nostalgia that it would be jarring.”“She’s an icon of my youth, the eternal cool girl who embodied the authenticity of the ’90s,” she continued. “And I want to hold onto my illusions of her.”A Robert Rich collage.Robert Rich More